Following the record opening for the avengers this weekend, I decided to pop into HSX, the Hollywood Stock Exchange, to see the reaction the market was having to the record breaking opening of The Avengers. The impact was immediately clear.
If you will, just imagine a camera doing a dramatic close up of Dr. Evil as he asks for…200 Mil-lion Dollars. So it’s huge, and everybody is shocked, even those claiming not to be (does anything shock them, ever ever?). But what Moby wonders is…are superheroes now their own genre, like horror and sci-fi? I mean, officially?
Four of the top five movers are comics related properties, some without any news events for months. For those who are not familiar, HSX is a fictional stock market that is free to play (without real money, just for fun folks) where the price of a stock is based on things like the opening weekend gross and such. There is more to it, but for now, all you need to know is that for the most part the market in HSX is what I would call ‘event driven’. Usually, it takes some bit of news regarding a particular movie to spike it’s stock a bit, like a new trailer, or a star becoming attached to the project, or maybe an opening date being announced.
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The impact of The Avengers is quite epic simply because the impact of this ‘event’ is spreading to other films of the same genre. This would be like a great crime drama lifting other crime dramas, or a mystery being so darn good that other movies in that genre getting a boost. Take Luke Cage for example. The last event news for that title was Apr 20, 2011. And with the release of the Avengers it goes from mid-H$2 range to over H$10! Wow. Black panther had it’s last news event even longer ago, way back on Jan 20, 2011, yet still managed a 76% bump today.
What Moby takes from this: Comic books movies may seem like nothing new, but the fact is that they have only started to arrive at a normal pace and in true blockbuster quality in the last several years. Safe to say they have firmly established themselves already as a viable genre when done right, but just what ‘done right’ means is what Hollywood still seems to be trying to figure out (I’m looking at you, The Spirit [2008]). Perhaps Comics Based movies are here to stay as a genre, like horror or sci-fi, or maybe not. In any case, there are a lot of other comics based films coming out soon, in the can, or in development; and you can bet Hollywood is breathing a big sigh of relief when they look at that opening record.
